Giants' chances to win ugly are over

Oct. 20, 2008

Written by

Sam Borden

Journal News columnist

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - Say this at the top because it's only fair: The NFL is a league borne of parity and a win is a win is a win. Upsets happen all the time, so at the end of the season, the record trumps all. It doesn't matter how the victories looked or who they came against, just that there are a lot of them.

Still, that doesn't mean some games shouldn't be easier than others, doesn't mean some parts of the schedule shouldn't go more smoothly than others. There are good teams and bad teams, and the Giants have played mostly bad teams so far this season, including the 49ers - a very bad team - yesterday at Giants Stadium.

That is not the Giants' fault. They don't make the schedule and Tom Coughlin has (rightly) conditioned his players not to see any opponent as weaker than any other. "We just need to keep going 1-0 every week," Derrick Ward said after a 29-17 win. "That's got to be our focus. We can't look ahead."

Fine. The Giants can think that. But it's also na´ve to believe that the way the Giants performed during their first five games will tell as much about what kind of team they really are as how they perform in their next five will. Truth is, the easy - or just easier - stretch is now over. Starting this week against Pittsburgh (followed by Dallas, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Arizona and Washington) the margin for error and sloppiness and undisciplined play is considerably smaller. Brandon Jacobs, who ran for 69 yards and two touchdowns, stood barefoot at his locker yesterday afternoon said it simply: "We have to play way better than we did today and last week if we want to even have a shot against Pittsburgh."

He is right. Good teams beat not-good teams most of the time, and the Giants are, at the very least, a good team. They did their job against St. Louis and Cincinnati, Seattle and San Francisco. The win over Washington in Week 1 looks better now than it did at the time, when the Redskins seemed to be running in circles; the loss last week against Cleveland on the road is a reasonable occurrence in a league where home underdogs surprise more often than one might expect.

The Giants got through this opening stretch of their season the same way they got through yesterday's game: They did enough. They are 5-1, which is what the defending Super Bowl champions should be against a group of so-so teams, and they did it by rolling up wins in games where they were sometimes dominant, sometimes ugly.

This latest effort was an ugly one. The Giants were not crisp, were not sharp for most of the game. They played inconsistently on both sides of the ball. They acted immaturely.

Afterward, there was the inherent exuberance that comes with winning any game tempered slightly by the knowledge that the end result did not tell the entire story. The Giants scored 29 points but had only 273 net yards on offense (they average about 420); the Giants benefited from three takeaways but one interception was literally thrown directly into Michael Johnson's stomach with no other players around while one fumble came on a botched handoff exchange; the Giants covered well on special teams but allowed a blocked field goal to be returned for a touchdown.

Then there were the penalties. The penalties were everywhere. Eleven for 80 yards, and even at the very end, when Coughlin and the coaches were exuberantly congratulating Jeff Feagles for dropping a meaningless punt inside the 10-yard line, their joy was tempered by a flag: Dominic Hixon had run out of bounds chasing the kick and then was the first player to touch it, a penalty that gave the 49ers the ball on their own 20 instead of near their own end zone.

Silly as that was, that penalty was tame compared to the foolish personal fouls on Plaxico Burress (in the second quarter) and Sean O'Hara (in the third). O'Hara delivered a late and vicious block from behind while Burress simply mouthed off, talking way too long to an official about a previous offensive pass interference call he deemed unfair.

Burress then got into a testy exchange with Coughlin on the sideline, and was neither repentant nor particularly contrite about the situation afterward. Coughlin ended his press conference in a huff after a question on the subject, stalking off the podium while muttering, "How about winning the game and talking about that?"

Whatever. Burress' indiscretions will no doubt continue to be an issue going forward, and they are only a small part of a general sharpening that the Giants need to do as they enter the gauntlet of their schedule. Less penalties. Less turnovers. Less undermining of the talent they've got on their roster.

Jacobs paused then. "We can't win ugly at Pittsburgh," he said. "We can't go in and expect them to lay down for us."

No they can't. Not at Pittsburgh or against Dallas or any of the rest, really. The NFC East is the best division in football and that means there is no faking it. The Giants say they can play slicker and smarter and at a higher level than what they've shown recently. They say they can do more than they've already done.